Art in an Octagon: The Schinkel Pavilion Berlin

The Schinkel Pavilon in Berlin-Mitte is perhaps Germany?s most unconventional art association. Where GDR nomenklatura once held cocktail parties, now Douglas Gordon, Cyprien Gaillard and Isa Genzken hold exhibitions. ... more

15/08/2008

From the Feuilletons

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Süddeutsche Zeitung 11.08.2008

Fritz Göttler watched Michel Houellebecq's directorial debut of "The Possibility of an Island" at the film festival in Locarno and was rather taken by it. "Benoit Magimel plays a young man who's time as an assistant to the teacher of a UFO sect allows him to profit from the techniques of eternal life. Women become unnecessary, and you don't even need a mother. Human beings clone themselves from generation to generation, becoming more doughy and formless over time, and every now and then Magimel morphs into his creator Houellebecq. After the great catastrophe the world becomes just as contourless as the protagonists who people it. This film packs no scandal, gone is Houellebecq's familiar we-are-all-assholes attitude. It's been watered down â the familiar lament when books are filmed. But Houellebecq has never hidden the fact that he's writing in the world of technical reproduction, that he loves surfaces and that superficiality for him is no dirty word."

Die Tageszeitung 12.08.2008

Maxi Obexer reports on the uproar which followed the opening of the new Museum for Contemporary Art in the South Tirolean city of Bozen, where Martin Kippenberger's bright green frog on a crucifix is on show. Of course it offends religious sensibilities. "Any one who thought that the collection of religious maniacs in their penitential robes, who have gathered in front of the Museion every day since the opening, would eventually calm down, are mistaken. They might represent a minority, but it is in the nature of the religiously insulted to strike out powerfully in the name of the larger majority. And the schützenverein members (highly traditional shooting association) have taken to protest marching in their lederhosen, demanding that the frog be removed."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 12.08.2008

The mix of soundbites available on the internet is fatal for classical music, writes music critic Wolfgang Schreiber, because it so often destroys what Walter Benjamin would call the "aura". But Schreiber's journey through YouTubeleft him breathless, just the same. Glenn Gould for example: "In an early bit of rehearsal footage he is playing the Prelude from Bach's Partita in D minor in a private house, when suddenly the teenage pianist leaps up from the grand piano, paces nervously to the window before continuing where he left off at the keys. Then the camera cuts to his only listener who is sitting on the carpet: Gould's faithful collie. Half of the 20th century's history-making recitals are availalble to the YouTube user in tiny snippets, which he can assemble at whim. The inward-looking Prussian Wilhelm Kempffsings Beethoven's Sonata op. 90, Emil Gilels, the Russian piano tornado braces himself against the Walstein sonata and Paganini variations, Svjatoslav Richter makes Chopin and Ravel explode. A young Martha Argerich in a red dress furiously punches out Chopin's preludes, and the youthful thunderer Kissinexecutes Listzt's horrendous La Campanella Etude. A young Benedetti Michelangeli, an ancient Horowitz, a dynamic Ivo Pogorelich â all play Scarlatti exquisitely, and only Cziffralets the Liszt volcano explode. Then Daniel Barenboimattempts to teach the young Lang Lang how to play Beethoven's Appassionata on the piano: more line and chord, sound and spirit please! ... Further off the beaten path the intrepid clicker will stumble into ghostly hinterlands, through hot and cold showers of German musical history. Here is Furtwängler at the rehearsal of Schubert's Unfinished, then again at the finale of Beethoven's Ninth in 1942 where Goebbels shakes him warmly by the hand. You can also see the piece conducted by a lonely, uncommunicativeKarajan, or an ecstaticBernstein. The Führer himself makes a brief appearance in Bayreuth in 1937 with Winifred Wagner. Incredulous, you hasten on to the Donauwalzer, with the authentic nostalgia that only conductor Erich Kleiber can lend it, in the run-up to Second World War, in black and white."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 13.08.2008

The publication of a book by Patrick Buisson has left France in "erotic shock", as Cornelius Wüllenkemper reports. "1940-1945 â The Erotic Years" tells of the "France's fascination with German soldiers. The very concept of French manliness was to disappear in the flight from the German invaders. Europe's numerically strongest military power surrendered to the superior fighting prowess of the German troops within just a few weeks, as an estimated eight million French fled south in panic. Buisson claims that the Germans' military superiority left the French in an 'erotic shock': ''The northern body culture completely unhinged the French concept of morality. The Germans stripped to the waist to wash in village fountains or to clean their weapons. The bodies of the German soldiers utterly discombobulated France â these boys were groomed, tall and muscled.'"

The theatre intermission is under threat in Germany from people who argue that it does nothing but batter the fragile work of art with the profanities of food, drink and toilets. Martin Krumbolz is appalled and summons Roland Barthes' 'The Pleasure of the Text' to win over doubters: "'Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes?' the author asks. And continues: 'It is the intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is the flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 15.08.2008

Syrian philosopherSadik Jalal al-Azmdeclares a third way for Muslim belief, between radicalism and state Islam: "This is the commercial Islam of the middle classes. It is represented by a huge number of institutions, including the chambers of commerce and industry or the branches of the Islamic banking industry. And since this middle class represents the backbone of civil society in the various countries, this form of Islam could become the Islam of Muslim civil society as a whole. It is a moderate, conservative form of Islam, which doesn't interfere with the pace of business. It wants as little to do with leftist world improvers as it does with radical Islamic zealots."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 14.08.2008

French composer Olivier Messiaen would have turned 100 this year. Two of his most prominent students, Pierre Boulez and George Benjamin, this season's composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival, talk to Max Nyffeler about their great teacher. Benjamin: "One topic to which he was forever returning was irreversible rhythm which reads identically backwards or forwards. This way of structuring time characterised his entire thinking. His music did not develop towards an ending as is the case in most Western music. He gave you the impression that time was rotating." Boulez: "Infinite time as a segment of eternity was a fundamental concept of his music. He did not regard the necessary end of a piece as an end of reflection. He never talked about religion to me because he knew how sceptical I was about it. Once he did say to me, with a mixture of sadness and humour: 'The three most important things in my life are religion, organs and birds. But none of my students seem interested in them.'"

Georgia

Berliner Zeitung 14.08.2008

Director and author Nino Haratichvili witnessed the war in Georgia. She describes what she saw and concludes: "The last days here were pure agony, a death struggle, and I hope we will all be able to reawaken from this struggle with our health in tact. But we will need help. We need clear words. The world has to say that the 21st century will not tolerate the use of this sort of brutal violence in a democracy, where people die, where an entire country is occupied by another. Bombs are falling across Georgia as we speak: on university buildings, on hospitals, on factories and bridges. While the whole of Tiflis is demonstrating, the Russian government is talking about 'aims achieved' about 'the end of Georgian aggression and the protection of its citizens.' There was no mention of Chechnya. Anyone who brought it up is now dead. We can no longer stay silent about Georgia."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 14.08.2008

Georgian media studies expertDevi Dumbadze believes that Georgia has to free itself from its irrational nationalism if it is to successfully stand up to Russia. "This militant nationalism which is on the verge of losing all grip on reality may well have fed off the grievances about conflicts lost in South Ossetia and Abkhazia fifteen years ago. Georgia is trapped between being inferior to Russia (as the real enemy behind Abkhazia and Ossetia) its dependence on international aid (which won't be coming in military form from Nato) and its own desire to compensate for the painful loss of territorial unity."

Other papers 15.08.2008

What is at stake in Georgia is Europe, which must position itself clearly against Russia, writeAndre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy in a joint article for the French newspaper Liberation. "The general staff in the Kremlin has never believed in the existence of a 'European Union'. It claims that lurking under all the wonderful speeches in Brussels are century-old rivalries and national identities which can be mercilessly manipulated to lay out all sides. Europe, which was built to stand against the Iron Curtain, which celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolutions is on the verge of a coma. 1945-2008."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÂ Â about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more